1 Investment to Rule Them All

A friend once asked me, “How do I start investing if I don’t have much money?”

That is a legitimate question, especially for students just out of college or working adults who have just entered the corporate world.

To answer my friend’s question, I jogged back my memory to recall out how I first started investing. I, too, didn’t have much money when I started my investing journey.

I remember all I had was the monthly allowance given to me during National Service, which I had squirrelled away diligently.

With the money I had, I invested in books on personal finance and stock market investing. I remember the first book I bought was Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I also went for an investment course to help bring down the steep learning curve (I had no accounting or finance background from school).

Essentially, what I did was to invest in myself. By investing in myself and not on a broker’s hot tip, I accumulated the knowledge needed to navigate the stock market.

Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors the world has seen, mentioned in an interview recently that the best investment you can make is one that “you can’t beat” and that is investing in yourself.

He said:

“Ultimately, there’s one investment that supersedes all others: Invest in yourself. Nobody can take away what you’ve got in yourself, and everybody has potential they haven’t used yet.”

By investing in ourselves first, we will have a proper foundation on which to build our stock portfolio. Without such knowledge, we might lose money from our investments without us knowing why.

Even after we have amassed the knowledge needed to invest in stocks, we should never stop learning.

In Tamil, there’s a saying that goes, “Known is a drop, unknown is an ocean”. There’s always something new to learn about investing every day since the stock market is very fluid.